Ottawa's bold gambit set to pay huge dividends for Avalanche

It took 514 days but Avalanche fans woke up last week finally not giving a damn about the Ottawa Senators. A lot has happened in that time. Ottawa went from an expected playoff team to a league doormat and the Avalanche flipped the script on a 48-point season to consecutive playoff seasons.

When Matt Duchene was finally (mercifully?) traded in the middle of a game, the world we were living in was significantly different than the one we’re in today. Nathan MacKinnon wasn’t a superstar, Mikko Rantanen was still an oversized baby goat on skates and not the Baby Jagr he’s morphed into, and if you had mentioned “La Tornade” back then a person might have thought you were talking about something you can eat at Coors Field.

When the Senators included their first-round selection in the deal, it was originally expected to be a mid-round selection at best. When the condition was announced that it was top-10 protected and the Senators would have the choice to defer to 2019, nobody expected it to come into play. Then Ottawa went to pieces and the Avs surged, changing the narrative completely.

Ottawa was faced with an absolutely brutal decision, especially after the draft lottery saw them drop from the second selection to the fourth pick in the 2018 NHL Draft. They could give Colorado the fourth pick and knowing they were facing a likely sell-0ff of all their best players, plan for the rebuild and suffer through another losing season but take a chance at getting Jack Hughes in 2019.

The Senators chose to defer, valuing money in their hand over the money of tomorrow. They were high enough on Brady Tkachuk, whom they selected fourth overall, that they simply took the player available to them and worried about the rest later. Well, tomorrow has finally come for the Ottawa Senators.

They traded away Erik Karlsson, Mike Hoffman, Mark Stone, Matt Duchene, and Ryan Dzingel following their decision to take Tkachuk and watched their young power forward blossom into one of their best players almost by default. The 45-point (22g, 23a) season from the feisty Tkachuk provides plenty of hope for the future and there’s plenty of reason today to believe Ottawa made a sound decision.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, the Avalanche have simply waited. They were prepared to use the fourth pick had Ottawa given it to them last year (it likely would have been Tkachuk) but the decision made gave them a full year to prepare for this year’s draft while knowing for sure they owned Ottawa’s pick. As the Senators stripped their NHL roster of high-end NHL players, fired their head coach, and relied on a bizarre number of formers Avs (hi, Cody Goloubef!), Colorado continued to do its homework behind the scenes with full confidence they were getting a top-10 selection.

When the Senators made their thud of a season official with a last-place finish, Colorado was guaranteed no lower than the fourth selection. We’ve seen this movie play out before as just two years ago when Colorado was the laughingstock of the league, Avs fans looked on in horror as Joe Sakic sat stone-faced on television when it was revealed three teams had leapfrogged Colorado and the reward for a 48-point season was the fourth pick.

That pick turned out to be Cale Makar so the cruel twist of fate looks like it’s headed for a happier ending than was expected. That was also a volatile draft class where the draft rankings saw significant movement from the beginning of the year to the end. Makar wasn’t even a first-round prospect when that season began and ended up being drafted fourth. Nico Hischier was ranked about 20th on some respected boards in the preseason and ended up the first selection. It was a wild year.

That is not the case with this year’s class. Jack Hughes has been the man atop these rankings for years and as he heads into the draft lottery this evening, he was unanimously ranked number one by all the scouts surveyed by Bob McKenzie last week. While Hughes is still at the top, the race for the top spot has tightened significantly thanks to the emergence of the next great Finnish forward, Kaapo Kakko.

Kakko broke Aleksander Barkov’s goal-scoring record for an under-18 player this season and has had a dominant finish (no pun intended) to his season. He also scored the golden goal in the WJC gold medal game against Hughes and the United States. The race for the top pick still has to go through Hughes and with the U-18 World Championships approaching, it will be one final look for a lot of these draft eligible kids to go against each other on the same stage. Unfortunately, Kakko was good enough this year to warrant a promotion to the senior Finnish team so he won’t be going against Hughes and Co. in the U-18 tournament.

Should Colorado’s selection fall outside the top two again, it’s another bit of cruelty from the hockey gods but given where the Avs are in this whole situation (you know, preparing for the postseason), it will be hard to complain too much given any outcome. Vasili Podkolzin is probably the top consolation prize if the Avs fall outside the top two but the discussion becomes much more muddled as the prospects three through ten in this year’s class all have arguments to be selected third.

All of this is to say Colorado is in the unique position of playing for the Stanley Cup while also preparing for a top-four draft pick. It’s been a long wait and so much has happened since Duchene’s departure from Denver. Ottawa rolled the dice and now Colorado is set to cash in. 521 days after the trade was made, Colorado will finally know where their final piece of the Duchene trade will come from. Odds are it will be worth the wait.